Over Spring Break I frantically wrote three papers and drafted a presentation for school. I wanted to get as much done as possible since I figured this month would be full of long hours at work and ACT testing. (I wasn’t wrong – I started this post two weeks ago) My schedule for April was suspiciously full. But as my boss commented the other day, I find my balance in the kitchen. So while I was trying to figure out how to phrase things, or which statistics I wanted to use, I managed to make a cake – Heath Bar!

I love Heath bars. The chocolate over the sweet toffee is just an almost perfect treat for me. Strawberry shortcake is better, but heath bars require no work on my end except finding them at the store. Much easier.

Chocolate cake isn’t my favorite, but I thought this cake had to be chocolate. It just wouldn’t work with a vanilla cake, so I found an old German Chocolate cake recipe and used the cake portion, leaving out the filling and frosting. I cut the recipe in half too – the original recipe calls for making three 9 inch round cakes to layer and I didn’t want that many. Cutting the recipe in half and using two  pans worked just fine – I just kept an eye on the cooking time and they came out perfect.

For the icing, I went with buttercream. I thought about going half cream cheese, half butter, but decided to go for straight butter as I wasn’t sure the tang of the cream cheese would work here. I added some caramel that I had to the butter while whipping it up and ended up with a nice base. It was still a little too rich for me, and a little too sweet, but overall it was fine.

To really get a Heath Bar cake I needed more than a chocolate cake and some caramel buttercream. I mean, those would be fine, but they wouldn’t be Heath Bar cake. So I crushed several mini Heath Bars and sprinkled the pieces both between the layers and on top of the cake. There you have it – Health Bar Cake. This wasn’t my best cake ever, and it certainly wasn’t the chocolate pie, but it worked and gave me a chance to play in the kitchen.